Tech Thursday – Windows is All In with ‘The Cloud’

At the Build Windows conference in California, reps for the company laid out it's plans for it's next version of Windows, Windows 8, as well as some of it's other products, like XBox and Windows Phone 7. It's all going to the cloud. This article on Extremetech lays it out in more detail, but here's the highlights.

Essentially, Microsoft is going to link all your devices together with a "continuous services" idea. It would take context and position into account. Buy something in one place, it's available on all your devices. While Apple has been doing something similar for a while now, this is still a big deal. Microsoft is not 5% of market share. They are 90% of the desktops of the world. This will be a big move for the "House that Gates built." And if you weren't ready to make a switch like that, you pretty much will be going there with Windows 8.

But with all this connectivity? I like the ideas myself, but still unsure how they would affect me everyday life if I used something as tightly knit as this. I don't mind my address book and calendars being synced, and my music and app for my iPod are available for me on all my iOS devices. Internet providers yell about not enough bandwidth because of people downloading movies and watching streaming video and bandwidth caps. So are the providers going to be able to support all this? And at what additional cost to us?

Are you looking forward to your XBox and Windows Phone 7 being able to talk to each other?